Edited by Lidia Vianu, Violeta Baroană and Ștefan Mălaimare

We are now in the 31st Century, at a time when words such as pupil or student have lost their meaning. Everyone wears a QUARK behind their ear. The Quark is a device that instantly connects absolutely everyone to the entire culture of the Universe. Everybody can talk about absolutely everything without having studied one single day in their lives: they merely ask for the needed information, and everything ever accomplished in the field is on the spot transferred to their minds.

It is the year 3041. The University of Bucharest is 1177 years old. Like all other ‘educational’ buildings, it had closed its gates long ago. A group of young people in their twenties, coming from several planets, have been assigned to discard the incredibly old computers that have been hanging around the university premises for at least ten centuries! They have made an intriguing discovery: the name of their discovery is Contemporary Literature Press. It was found in a lost loop of the Quark-net.

The youths are now refusing to leave the University of Bucharest. They have taken up English—a ‘language’ as old as all universities, and as useless nowadays, when everyone OMNI-THINKS. They are reading a ‘book’. Its title is The Exam Book! It originated in an ‘examination’ that came at the end of a ‘course’ in 20th and 21st Centuries English Literature, attended long ago by undergraduates of Bucharest University. The book consists of the examination subject, the students’ written papers, the students’ answers to a questionnaire, and a number of statements regarding their opinions as to the importance of literature in the study of the English language. The teacher who gave the examination deliberately refrained from mentioning any marks in this volume. Together with her students, she was ‘reading’ Finnegans Wake, written by a 20th Century writer, called James Aloysius Joyce.

The Exam Book! passed unnoticed in the year 2014—the memorable year of the Crimean War!

Now, 1027 years later, the young team are going through it word by word. They will not leave the English Department headquarters located in The Street of the Old Breadmaker and of Children. They are on the first floor, in a room still bearing the name it had had back in 2014: James Joyce. The subtitle of The Exam Book! is ‘A Christmas present to all the teachers of literature, from the students themselves.’

‘This is nat language at any sinse of the world’ (Finnegans Wake 083.12:1). But it works, once you realize it can be learned. Merry Christmas again, Mr Joyce!

Lidia Vianu

Professor at the Old University of Bucharest

(Romanian follows below)

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